Re: USB Pendrive as Swap space

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 19:04:07 +0100, Peter Jones wrote:

I know that Microsoft has thought about using a pendrive as extra ram, but
I've got other ideas (maybe better). Having extra RAM in the form of a
pendrive isnt bad, but even with this extra space you might run out (think
md5sum calculation of dvd image.....). So what about having a pendrive as
swap space instead? Wouldnt that be a good idea? That way if you do run out
of RAM, your machine is still going to run still quite fast. Any thoughts?
Further more, is it possible to unmount swap space whilst your machine is
running, and re-assign the swap space to point to your USB pendirve, and
not the hard disk?
Just a thought, but definately worth finding out about, especially since
pendrives are relatively cheap, even to 2GB!

I can think of two reasons why it would not be a good idea. 1) USB 2.0 is
a LOT slower than a hard disk 2) flash devices have a rather limited
lifetime in term of write cycles - you could kill it prematurely.

.